MAKE SURE YOU SEPARATE THE HERD!

Added: 2026-05-25

[00:00:00]Yeah, this Proud Boy is right in Washington Square Park, baby.

[00:00:05]>> Hey farm hands, it's Will coming to you from the back 40. Now, I came across this video today and I really don't want to make any comments about the video because, you know, we see these chatter heads. They're a dime a dozen, but it reminded me of a story from when I was a kid growing up on the cattle farm. And for those of you that never grew up on a cattle farm or you don't understand animal genetics, you have to be really careful when you're raising stock to make sure that the daughters of the bulls don't end up back in a pin with their daddies because it causes a lot of problems. And I remember when I was a kid, we used to separate out heers. We called them replacement heers. We would separate them out and we would make sure we got them into the fields on the other side of the farm and then we would go out and we would buy a new bull to come in and breed these heers so that we could restock our herds. But we were always very careful just like other cattle farmers and cattle ranchers to make sure that close relative animals never ended up in the same breeding pin together because it causes like I said a lot of bad things to happen. Now, just to be brutally honest with you, one year we made a mistake. Now, I was a kid, so I don't blame myself, but my grandfather somehow over the course of working a herd two times over the course of the year, he failed to get one of these heer calves, one of these little female calves, uh, out of the herd and ended up wintering over the winter with this heer growing into a breedable female, uh, in the same pin with her daddy, who was one of our prize bulls. And inevitably, I hate to be the one to break it to you, but in the animal world, if you leave a female in a pin with males, it doesn't matter if they're related or not, they end up doing what God made them to do. And that happened in this case.

[00:01:59]And this little heer was bred. And sure enough, when cving season rolled around, uh, she gave birth to a calf.

[00:02:11]Let me tell you about this calf. Many times when this happens, and this was the case with this calf, these animals are born with unusually large heads and jowls. And this calf had that problem.

[00:02:22]It had an unusually large head. Uh, and it often times couldn't even get its head in a feed bucket or in a feed trough because its damn head was just so big. And its jowls uh were unusually large as well. The bottom jawbone, for some reason, was extremely enlarged. and uh it could it could hardly feed. We had to make a special feed trough for this calf as it was growing up to make sure that it could get its head down into the feed bin uh in order to eat. The other issue that this thing had is it was unusually short. You know, a a regular steer as it's being fed out over time will basically kind of grow up to about shoulder height or breast height on a full grown man. And uh this calf never did that. Uh it it was unusually short.

[00:03:15]It was stubby. Uh and you could always tell that it had a chip on its shoulder because of that. Not only did it get bullied by the other calves when it was growing up, but even when it was a little bit larger and we were getting ready to take these steers to market, uh it had uh it had an attitude problem because you could tell it didn't like the fact that it was smaller uh than the other male calves. The other thing I noticed uh when I was a kid is that this animal had very small uh reproductive organs. In other words, whenever we worked these animals and we went through the castration process to get them ready for feed growth, this animal uh had very small reproductive organs. As a matter of fact, if I remember right, it only had one testicle and it was very small.

[00:04:05]Uh and when we went through the castration process, I think it took two of us to actually find the testicle that did exist on this animal and to get it uh removed. And then secondarily, um, it never really had a a working love stick, if you know what I mean. It just something was broken about it. Never got an opportunity to use it. And because of all of its other issues, frankly, um, the other, you know, cows in the herd and the heers in the herd really didn't ever want to have anything to do with it. And it just, it just gave this animal a really bad attitude. I can remember all the way up to the point uh where we actually ended up processing it for our own beef on the farm. Uh it just always had a really bad attitude. It would strut around. It would talk a big game. It would ball out loud. Uh it might even push others around with its head, but then the minute another animal pushed back, it would fall down on the ground. Sometimes it would run away. And you know, it was really sad. Honestly, if you just watched it with an unbiased diet was really sad to see this animal with really small reproductive organs that was shorter than most other animals with a big old head and these big old jowls, unaccepted by the rest of the herd, uh, just wander around on its own out in the wild. It was really, really sad. I felt bad for it. Now in the stock industry in in farming we call this you may have learned this in uh FFA if you were an FFA member but in the farming industry we call this inbreeding depression.

[00:05:46]All of these side effects, all these genetic defects, the big giant head, the big giant js, the strange look, uh the missing reproductive organs, being born with no or one testicle, having a really small reproductive organ. All of these things are a direct result of this uh inbreeding depression. That's what we call it uh in the farming world.

[00:06:14]And uh anyway, it was just a sad story.

[00:06:17]Uh this animal was an outcast.

[00:06:21]Um and it was treated differently by the rest of the herd. And for that reason, it was very angry all of the time. And I don't know why, but uh anyway, this video made me think of that. And I thought I'd come on and share the story.

[00:06:35]I hope you guys have a great